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This paper reports on a study of the acquisition of subject and object relative clauses by monolingual French speaking children aged 4-10 years, in Rimouski, Quebec. The children were tested for their comprehension of six types of relative sentences. A coordinate sentence control test was administered. An adult control group was also tested on the relative sentence test. The results are discussed within the framework of two principles proposed to account for language learning. Slobin's (1971) putative universal principle claims that the interruption and rearrangement of linguistic units is hard for both the child language learner and the adult. Sheldon (1974) has proposed the Parallel Function Hypothesis, which claims that sentences in which the identical NPs have the same grammatical function in their respective clauses are easier than sentences in which the identical NPs have different grammatical functions. The results of both the child and the adult study support the Parallel